Field
This invention relates to speech enhancement and more particularly relates to speech therapy and associated brain reconfiguration for subjects suffering from brain-based speech deficiencies including aphasia.
Description of the Related Art
One in 272 Americans suffer from some form of aphasia. In non-fluent aphasia, also called expressive aphasia, subjects have difficulty in articulating, but in most cases there is relatively good auditory verbal comprehension. Examples of non-fluent aphasia are: Brocha's aphasia, Transcortical motor aphasia, and Global aphasia.
For years, it has been noted that there is a link between music and speech. Aphasic subjects have been capable of singing words that they cannot speak. In 1973, the first music-based treatment for aphasic subjects was introduced and titled Melodic Intonation Therapy or MIT.
MIT uses the musical element of speech (melody and rhythm) to improve expressive language by capitalizing on preserved function (singing) and engaging language-capable regions in the undamaged right hemisphere of the brain to compensate for the damage in the speech areas of the left hemisphere
An aphasic subject may desire to repeat a requested phrase but cannot process the request using the left hemisphere of the brain because the speech areas are damaged. In some cases it has been shown that with proper therapy and retraining aphasic subjects can process the speech request through music by employing the right hemisphere of the brain.
The use of methods such as Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT) is designed to lead a subject from singing to actually intoning or singing simple 2-3 syllable phrases to speaking more complex phrases across several different levels of complexity. A Session Guide may sing or hum the requests to the subject and may tap on the subjects hand in an effort to help advance the learning process when responding to speech requests. Some studies have suggested that tapping the left hand may engage a right-hemisphere sensorimotor network that controls both hand and mouth movements.
Effectiveness of these techniques is compromised, however, by factors including insufficient data from the subject, musical ability/inability of the therapist and its effect on the subject, inexactness in the coordination of tapping and singing due to human error and coordination from the therapist, inability to evaluate what approaches are more successful for each individual subject, lack of historical data from other prior subject sessions to guide the next step during the subject session, and human limitation on the therapist's ability to analyze a subject's response and formulate the most effective next step.
Thus, the current methodologies used to treat aphasic subjects fail to optimize the results and a need exists for a new technology to mitigate the current limitations of aphasia subject diagnosis, treatment and re-training.